


Five Things That Changed

by maybecatie



Category: American Actor RPF, British Actor RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-27
Updated: 2011-03-27
Packaged: 2017-10-17 07:55:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/174593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybecatie/pseuds/maybecatie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This was mostly an attempt at writing something in a thousand words or less. And its a thousand even. Woo!</p>
    </blockquote>





	Five Things That Changed

**Author's Note:**

> This was mostly an attempt at writing something in a thousand words or less. And its a thousand even. Woo!

Five Things That Changed

1:His Hair

 

Jesse had been urging him to cut it for weeks, and he’d always blatantly refused. The “mop” on his head, Jesse argued, was borderlining ridiculousness.

“Seriously, Andrew, it looks like you have a Lhasa Apso on your head.”

“You love my hair, Eisenberg, and you know it. Plus, you’re not much of one to talk yourself.” He’d take the end of a curl on Jesse’s head and pull it taut with two fingers, making an exaggerated cartoon-style booiiinnng noise when he released it.

Jesse wouldn’t be very amused.

Indeed, Andrew’s hair was more than fashionably long. But it is also true that Jesse did have a fetish for it, loved to pull it, tousle it, especially in public, even if the length was something he would never let rest. When it came up, Andrew would simply smirk and shake it all in Jesse’s face just to spite him.

Now, there’s no one to fight him about it, to make comments about it every day, to glare and pout and huff about it and try to drag him by the arm into Hair Cuttery whenever they’re at the mall.

And so the very first thing Andrew does is cut it. He does it himself over the bathroom sink with an electric razor. Shears it right down to the scalp – a clean cut. The golden locks drop into the ceramic bowl, and he flushes them down the drain with the tap. Gone. It’s what Jesse wanted.

 

2: His phone number

He can’t deal with the calls, even from those with the best of intentions. Too many people come to offer their condolences, but after a while, these only make him feel worse. He tries, at first, simply not carrying it with him, but there’s something he likes about the metal in his pocket pressed snug against his thigh, something that brings a sense of security – something he now needs even more desperately. So there are no more calls, and when asked, he simply says he no longer has one. (This is true if you’re referring to his house phone, and if you aren’t, it’s simply a lie by omission. After getting that call that night, he threw it right through the wall, breaking both the dry-wall and the phone itself. The pieces of it are still left on the floor, the hole going unfixed.)

But he can’t bring himself to change his answering machine on the house phone, the one that connects automatically when someone tries to make a call, the one that plays out loud – which is at least twice a day- and leaves Andrew crying too loudly to hear the message. Jesse recorded it, Andrew’s voice as only laughter in the background.

“You’ve got Andrew’s phone! This isn’t Andrew, by the way, but if you’re looking for him, you’ve made a good choice, because Andrew is super awesome! Leave a message for us!” He can’t bring himself, even though it’s grossly outdated, to erase the only recording there is or will be of Jesse’s voice.

 

3: His gas mileage

He can’t bear to stick around the same apartment for very long – everything’s so different, so wrong with Jesse not there. No scarf dangling on a hook by the door, no scents of dinner coming from the kitchen, none of that sweet voice to warm up the cold, empty air. Everything from the color of the walls Jesse had picked out – the one they’d got in an enormous fight over, debating the differences between Frost Wind and Niagara Falls - to a pair of Jesse’s old shoes still nestled by the door, is painful. Even physically so. The walls seem to move in closer every day, and Andrew even has nightmares where he’ll be standing in the middle of the apartment, only there will be no doors, and the walls will slowly move inwards, closer and closer, and he’ll run alongside them and feel for a door, a crack, any kind of escape, as they’re pushing him further and further in, and just when he feels the opposite wall brushing against his back, ready to crush him, he’ll wake up, only to find that reality is almost exactly the same.

He leaves, for a week, without telling anyone where he’s going – except Justin, only so he can drop by to feed the casts. For about a week, he drives up and down the east coast, from New York to Virginia, sleeping in the backseat, eating at TGI Fridays and Subway and whatever reasonable sustenance he can scrounge up from a gas station’s snack shop, living off a chunk of a couple hundred dollars out of his savings account.

 

4: His pets

He doesn’t have the heart to take Jesse’s poor old cats to the shelter. And who would? The first thing he does is snatch then up from Jesse’s apartment (all four of them, including the kitten who has yet to be given a name, and who, maybe just to torture himself, he dubs Jesse) and sign up for foster-cat-parenthood just as Jesse did.

They’ve been having fits, prowling around Andrew’s apartment morosely, demanding in their feline language of hissing and wailing to know where Jesse is, and it only seems to get harder as the time goes on. They like to sit at the window; one or two of them at a time will often be posted there, for hours on end, gaze unbroken, as if waiting for Jesse to come back home. Sometimes, Andrew will do the same, just sit with them and wait, maybe out of some bizarre hope that Jesse will show up. Sometimes, Andrew even dreams. He dreams he’ll be sitting in this very spot, and a figure will appear coming around a corner, and the sun will shine on a head of shaggy brown curls and a trench coat, and it will be him, and the cats will cry out, and he’ll jump up and run into the street to meet him, and all will be well again in the kingdom.

But that never happens.

 

5: Everything.


End file.
